John McPhee Books in Order

McPhee's first book profiles Princeton basketball star and future senator Bill Bradley during his senior year. Detailed accounts of practices and games sit alongside glimpses of Bradley's studies and character, capturing an athlete on the brink of larger careers.

This portrait of Frank Boyden follows the longtime head of Deerfield Academy through his daily routines, from recruiting farm boys to coaching teams and planning buildings. McPhee shows how one man's habits and temperament shaped a celebrated boarding school.

Beginning as a short piece on orange juice, this book expands into a compact history of the orange and the citrus industry. Growers, botanists, pickers, and processors populate a fast, fact-rich tour of one fruit's journey from grove to glass.

McPhee explores the New Jersey Pine Barrens, a vast sandy wilderness surrounded by suburban development. Meeting residents, historians, and ecologists, he uncovers the region's folklore, fragile ecology, and the long-running tension between preservation and development.

Five extended profiles introduce figures as varied as museum director Thomas Hoving, forager Euell Gibbons, a team of M.I.T. fellows in Africa, a Wimbledon groundskeeper, and travel writer Temple Fielding. McPhee's close attention turns each into a memorable character study.

Structured point by point around the 1968 U.S. Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, this book alternates on-court action with biographical portraits. Tennis becomes a way to explore race, class, temperament, and late-1960s American life.

Returning with his family to the Scottish island of Colonsay, ancestral home of the McPhees, the author observes the uneasy relationship between local crofters and the absentee laird. The island becomes a compact study of class, land, and tradition.

In three narrative journeys, McPhee brings conservationist David Brower face-to-face with a miner, a resort developer, and a dam builder. Their hikes, camping trips, and river runs become vivid arguments about how wild landscapes should be used or left alone.

In the title essay, McPhee works alongside farmers in New York City's open-air markets, watching small dramas play out around the hanging scales. Other pieces follow chefs, river runners, nuclear-plant designers, and pinball wizards in richly observed detail.

This slim volume collects two tennis essays, including a portrait of Wimbledon groundskeeper Robert Twynam and a close look at tournament traditions. Focusing on courts and caretakers rather than star players, McPhee reveals the craft behind championship tennis.

McPhee tells the story of the Aereon airship project, in which a small team tried to build a hybrid aircraft shaped like a fat flying triangle. Their technical hopes, financial troubles, and stubborn optimism become a case study in invention and persistence.

Part profile and part warning, this book follows nuclear physicist Theodore Taylor through weapons labs, power plants, and security briefings. Taylor explains how nuclear devices work and how vulnerable modern societies may be to small, improvised weapons.

This mid-career collection gathers narrative essays that roam from Georgia back roads to New Mexico racetracks, Atlantic City, and Scottish hills. The pieces share McPhee's interest in place, eccentric characters, and the hidden structures of ordinary landscapes.

Following master builder Henri Vaillancourt, McPhee learns how traditional birch-bark canoes are made and tested on a long trip through the Maine woods. The book revives a fragile craft while reflecting on technology, wilderness travel, and historical memory.

Edited by William L. Howarth, this first Reader gathers substantial excerpts from McPhee's early books, from A Sense of Where You Are through The Survival of the Bark Canoe. It offers a single-volume introduction to his subjects, structures, and voice.

Crisscrossing Alaska by bush plane, boat, and road, McPhee meets homesteaders, prospectors, politicians, and city dwellers. In three linked sections, he portrays the state's urban centers, remote bush communities, and raw wilderness as they pull against one another.

The opening volume of Annals of the Former World takes McPhee and several geologists across the austere Basin and Range province between Utah and California. Highway journeys and roadside outcrops introduce plate tectonics and the vast timescales of earth history.

Traveling with geologist Anita Harris from Brooklyn's outwash plains through Appalachian ridges and Midwestern fields, McPhee explores competing ideas about how the mountains formed. The book is both a portrait of a scientist and a tour of evolving geologic thought.

Immersed in Switzerland's citizen army, McPhee visits training grounds, war games, and border posts to see how a small neutral country prepares for war. His account examines military culture, politics, and everyday Swiss life with the eye of a reporter.

This extended essay follows the arrival of modern telecommunications and a new gold rush in and around Circle City, Alaska. McPhee tracks prospectors, trappers, and town residents as telephone lines and rising gold prices reshape a remote river community.

Eight long essays carry McPhee from Arctic Alaska to New Jersey, Maine, and beyond. Bears, bush pilots, family physicians, and miniature power companies all appear in a collection that captures the range of his early-1980s magazine work.

Reporting from rural Maine, McPhee spends time with young family doctors who have chosen broad, community-based practice instead of narrow specialization. Their work with patients of all ages becomes a window into medicine, training, and small-town life.

Gathering The Crofter and the Laird with additional essays, this book follows McPhee through the Scottish Highlands and Hebrides. He writes about island crofters, rugged coasts, and the pull of ancestral landscapes on contemporary lives.

Set largely in Wyoming, this volume in Annals of the Former World centers on geologist David Love and the remote ranch where he grew up. As McPhee rides with him across the high plains, the history of the Rockies and the modern West comes into focus.

This photo-and-text book pairs McPhee's writings on geology and ecology with landscape photographs by Tom Till. Short passages and images together highlight the canyons, deserts, and rock formations that appear throughout his longer geologic works.

McPhee visits Louisiana, Iceland, and the mountains above Los Angeles to watch people fight floods, lava, and debris flows. Through engineers, townspeople, and field trips, he shows what happens when human plans collide with slow, implacable natural forces.

Following second mate Andy Chase as he searches for work and signs on to the S.S. Stella Lykes, McPhee records life aboard one of the last American merchant ships. Storms, ports, and shipboard routines reveal a proud but shrinking industry.

Traveling with tectonics expert Eldridge Moores, McPhee crosses California from the Sierra Nevada to the coast, using road cuts and fault lines to tell the state's geologic story. Gold rush history and earthquake science intertwine with maps in motion.

Aboard an American freighter on a long run along the Pacific coast of the Americas, McPhee chronicles the routines, dangers, and camaraderie of the crew. The voyage becomes a vivid portrait of the modern merchant marine and its uncertain future.

McPhee traces how economist Norton Dodge quietly bought and smuggled thousands of works by underground Soviet artists out of the USSR. The book follows Dodge's risky trips, the artists he met, and what became of their once-forbidden paintings and sculptures.

This nonfiction volume presents McPhee's reporting in book form, following real people as they confront large changes in their lives or surroundings. Through close observation and careful structure, he shows how broad forces register in everyday experience.

A curated sampler of McPhee's later work, this volume offers excerpts and pieces from books on Alaska, shipping, geology, and more. It is designed as a stand-alone introduction to his mature nonfiction for both new and longtime readers.

In this collection, McPhee ranges from Nevada cattle country to specialized forensic labs. The title essay follows a brand inspector investigating modern rustling, while other pieces explore obscure trades and landscapes that quietly underlie everyday life.

Combining four earlier geology books with a final section, this Pulitzer Prize-winning volume follows McPhee and several geologists along the fortieth parallel. Road trips, road cuts, and fieldwork reveal how the North American continent took shape over deep time.

A companion guide for teachers using Daniel Bonevac's Worldly Wisdom in their courses. It offers suggestions for presenting the readings, along with ideas for discussions, assignments, and exams that help bring the main text into the classroom.

This anthology gathers favorite pieces by journalists who have held Princeton's Ferris and McGraw professorships, showcasing decades of literary nonfiction. The selections range from political reporting to intimate portraits, making it useful for students and general readers.

Blending memoir, biology, and history, McPhee follows the American shad from ocean runs to upriver spawning grounds. Fishing with scientists and friends, he explores the species' role in ecosystems and in the lives of figures from George Washington onward.

Drawn from The Founding Fish, this limited volume focuses on the American shad's life cycle, river migrations, and place in American history. McPhee blends natural history with angling stories and historical anecdotes about this remarkable fish.

McPhee rides with truckers, towboat pilots, ship captains, and package sorters to see how freight actually moves. His portraits turn chemical tankers, coal trains, and overnight hubs into gripping stories of skill, routine, and risk.

Ten linked pieces, many of them personal, recall McPhee's childhood, parents, travel, and reporting assignments. From lacrosse fields to European chalk cliffs, the collection shows how small experiences open out into larger stories.

An anthology of contemporary nonfiction by writers and journalists connected to Princeton University, coedited by McPhee. Essays on politics, science, culture, and everyday life offer students and general readers a wide sampling of modern narrative journalism.

McPhee turns his reporter's eye on his own craft, using case studies from decades of magazine work to show how he outlines, drafts, interviews, and revises. It is a compact, story-rich guide to long-form nonfiction writing.

Divided into a sports section and a collage of brief vignettes, this collection ranges from fishing, golf, and football to memories, odd encounters, and unfinished pieces. Together the fragments form an informal, sideways memoir of McPhee's reporting life.

In short, playful chapters drawn from old notebooks, McPhee revisits story ideas he never turned into full books. The vignettes range from chance encounters to half-finished reporting trips, creating a reflective, late-career mosaic of curiosities and near-misses.